What happens in the game area? Which programs
will be available soon?
We had a sneak at four games that are still in development but
look very promising!
[ Civ CTP | Fire &Darkness
| Parsec | Pingus | --links--]
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The market discovers Linux
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In the game area many new products are announced for the future. The companies
discovered that they can make money in the Linux community and now commercial
games appear.
In the past Quake and QuakeII were the big exceptions but now "thick"
and fast new announcements of games for Linux are made. But do not
be afraid there are still games in development that are offered with a
GPL
or other free license.
That's why we report about two commercial and two free games.
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Civilization: Call To
Power
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This game does not need any introduction. The new continuation of the
Civilization-series is in the Linux version now available by the American
company "Loki Entertainment Software".
The game will appear at the same time as a WINDOWS version and American
citizens can order in advance for $50.
The necessary hardware requirements should be the same for the
Linux and the WINDOWS version. Of course with more safety on Linux. ;-)
The Linux version will not be an add-on to the WINDOWS game like known
from Quakewas, but will be separate in an own box. The game should
run on all well known distributions.
The beta testing has already been started and 200 testers are in the
lucky position of beeing able to play Civilization. The rest has to wait
until the final
release on the 26th of March.
Fire & Darkness is the second commercial game in development by
Singularity
Software. It is a 3D flight simulator like Fury 3 from Microsoft and
is programmed for Linux and WINDOWS at the same time.
At March the 18th the programmers got awarded with the "Independent
Game Awards" with a 10.000 dollar prize. The jury made a good decision
as you can see looking at the graphic engine of the game.
"The status of the development is not satisfactory" say the programmers
(e.g. the sound does not work on Linux) and they do not want to
present a playable demo, now. But on their homepage
is already a not playable version which is enough to fascinate you. Owners
of a 3Dfx-card are lucky because they can see a firework with explosions
and smoke.
Until now Singularity
has not found a partner to distribute the game but the won award
should help that, we will soon find this game in the shops.
In contrary to the above two games the space 3D-shooter Parsec
shall be free. This game also offers a fantastic 3D-engine and 3Dfx
support. However, you just find a few videos and screenshots but nothing
to test.
The programmers carried out self-regulation to produce a top
game. They want to release a beta version only if it owns the name beta.
This should be a good decision if we were not so curios about the game.
Besides the graphic the announced network opportunities of the
game fascinates very much. The game, which is mainly constructed for fights
in the internet, can also be played in a local area net with the
included server.
All servers with a constant connection to the internet will be administrated
by a master-server. Now you can jump from one galaxy to another
(screenshot) using stargates and the master server leads you to the next
server which is responsible for this galaxy. We will wait and see ...
 
We will have to wait a long time until the game Pingus
will be ready because the momentary version number is 0.015 far away from
a useable game. But you should be happy about this because there is the
danger of addiction and you should enjoy your last free nights without
Pingus.
Pingus is a clone of the classic game Lemmings but as you can
see with small penguins and a special cuddle factor. Everyone who
cannot wait should help programming Pingus because this game has unrestricted
priority!
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